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In Reply to: Theft is theft. posted by markrohr on March 22, 2007 at 12:28:40:
There's a difference & I know you know better. Come on, now. You don't make the RIAA's case any better when you mischaracterize a civil offense to be a criminal one.I do not condone illegal file-sharing, but there's a clear difference here that the law has not grown to address. Throwing around terms like 'theft' just doesn't help. If one breaks into a store & physically robs something, then the owner is deprived of a physical product. In the case of a copy being created, the owner is not deprived of their original. None of this has been successfully defined yet, so it's a muddy debate, but one that's important enough to deserve to not be distorted even further with terms that do not apply. The natural course is for someone to inevitably step up with the point of how much credibility the RIAA deserves in the debate given the many foibles, especially the illegal ones, that its members have themselves been involved in...for decades.
I follow blogs like http://www.drmwatch.com/ and
http://www.recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/
fairly regularly. It's a shame that Sarah Seabury Ward didn't elect to do what the Santangelos & Lindors & Fosters have done. I'd be 100% behind the lawsuits if it were based on something less flimsy then IP addresses, which, as attested to in the deposition of the RIAA witness in the Lindor case, can be spoofed. Which seems to happen on this site on a regular basis, by the way.
In cases like Santangelo, when the RIAA realizes that they're wrong & have no chance to win, they attempt to simply drop the suit. In that case, though, the court is forcing them to at least cover the legal fees of the defendant in a case that should never have been brought.
The guys crying theft aren't even willing to compensate those for their costs when their suits are shown to be dead wrong. You're cheerleading for them. I trust that doesn't feel so good, does it? It won't get better if the few details surrounding the lawsuit filed against John Paladuk turn out to be an accurate representation of that situation.
Leave it to copyright infringement, if you would. As a man of reason, I would think you would agree that this seemingly minor difference is actually massive. As I'm sure you're aware, the vast majority of those being sued are settling. That's all fine & well. They should. But even one of these suits are simply unacceptable. Suing people without computers? People who don't know enough to use encryption on their routers? I understand that a person should be responsible for what goes on on their box in their home. But if someone glommed off their internet access? Spoofed their IP address?
You might respond that what I'm discussing here is one in a thousand. I don't care if it's one in a f*cking million. Unacceptable. Period. Maybe not if we're talking about an industry known for its ethics, but, again, we don't have to go there. Wait...Sony rootkit? Cheap Trick/Allmans' litigation? Sorry. Couldn't resist.
Meanwhile, I read a post by a frustrated CUSTOMER who purchased a CD...which was so DRM'd up the wazoo that his computer--a Mac--wouldn't even play it. From what I gathered, returning it wasn't even an option. Then I found this. I'd be interested to know if you'll still cry theft after reading this post--and, if you do, who exactly it is you'd be accusing.
Follow Ups:
I appreciate your post, J, as I always do, and there is much truth in it. But all this extra-fine semantic parsing simply gives cover to thieves and those who sympathize with them.A friend of my wife's, a PHD no less, knew I was a writer and asked me what word processor I preferred. After I told her she asked me if she could copy my copy of the program. I asked her if she would similarly walk into CompUSA, stuff the program into her pants, and walk out without paying.
Like so many, she thought that was different!
I wonder what she teaches her kids.
I stipulate: the record companies and the RIAA are evil, rapacious, and stupid. (So was the company whose software I recommended.) And I stipulate that technically what is happening is copyright infringement under the law.
Well, the truth is, the law has no bearing on my argument.
Whenever this comes up I cannot believe I'm having the conversation. Crikey, this is third-grade catechism stuff. One is either willing to steal--and here you can name any extenuating circumstances you like--or not.
Mark, I know this is starting to get a little old, but I've been watching this closely for more than 5 years now. Does it mean anything that every article I'm linking here is either from today or from a day or two ago? It's not a coincidence. Of course, it doesn't need to be said that 'stealing is wrong' or 'copyright infringement is wrong' or 'illegal file-sharing is wrong.' But then there's reality. And the reality is that the business uses these doom & gloom reports to their advantage, while muscling Microsoft into ridiculous extortion per Zune sold...and the DRM on Vista? If I didn't come across as many articles as I did on what the OS was designed to do, I would never have purchased a MacIntosh, as I did a few months ago. That's what the reports of what DRM was going to cause did for the marketplace in THIS household. I think you'll agree that nothing in Vista is likely to curb the growth of 'torrent' sites. But it HAS been a factor in Apple's growth.Oh, but Steve Jobs, he's that guy who wants to remove the DRM. What does he know. He's only sold a couple billion downloads over the past few years.
As for Lefsetz, who I assume you're familiar with, it's fair to point out that he works for Rhino/Warners, or the company that was responsible for the difficulties encountered by the person who paid money for music they could not play in the Consumerist piece.
LEFSETZ talks about downloading music illegally, and HE'S A LABEL GUY. And he's nutty & inconsistent & at times seems illogical...but at times he seems to make an awful lot of sense, too, even if he has to argue in uppercase to get it across.
And several times a week now he drives home the point that file-sharing is really not the problem...that it's part of the problem, sure, but it's an issue that's been mismanaged to the point where it's only one small piece of the puzzle.
It wasn't all that long ago that stuff we take for granted was not only illegal, but spoken of in the same terms you used back up there: either you're willing to engage in illegal behavior, or you're not.
People can come up with some darned good rationalizations for file-sharing. On the same day, we have both the Wall St. Journal & a label guy engaging in what I've seen you decry as 'situational ethics.'
Have you ever considered emailing Lefsetz?
"I stipulate: the record companies and the RIAA are evil, rapacious, and stupid. (So was the company whose software I recommended.) And I stipulate that technically what is happening is copyright infringement under the law.Well, the truth is, the law has no bearing on my argument."
I don't need convincing. Further, I stipulate to all you have said below. Every last word. You can post about how evil these folks are, how unjust their prosecutions are, how they deserve to go out of business, or worse. Go ahead, put twenty more such posts below mine. I stipulate to them in advance.
But all it amounts to is rationalization. At the end of the day, you either are a thief or you aren't.
...is too pompous for me to, in good conscience, copy as is. Then again, I can't say I'm a fan of its source, not because it's not capable of truth, but because I see it as a rather one-sided sort of place. Regardless, even a one-sided place comes up with something decent every once in awhile.From today's Huffington Post:
***
"Four months ago, I wrote an article about a young rap artist named Lupe Fiasco. Fiasco is a 24-year-old skateboarding Muslim from Chicago who raps about his distaste for the rampant materialism currently dominating hip hop and his desire to bring the troops home from Iraq.
"Though he received Grammy nominations in prestigious categories like Rap Album of the Year and Rap Single of the Year as well as rave reviews in practically every publication that is supposed to count, he has not even gone gold.
"While I was doing the piece, I called up Tom Silverman, the head of Tommy Boy Records, which was responsible for launching the careers of De La Soul and Queen Latifah. He said that while he thought Fiasco was a formidable talent, the current state of the market made it all but impossible for him to succeed.
"It's great that someone's taking a chance on a socially conscious hip-hop artist like Lupe but the economics are not as good as they once were," he told me. According to Silverman (as well as several other people I spoke to) the problem is not so much file sharing (which has been vastly inflated) as it is the consolidation of radio (which has largely gone ignored.)"
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-bernstein/on-the-the-state-of-the-m_b_44038.html (Open in New Window)
Wisconsin, considered to be a liberal school, is offering resistance to the RIAA's controversial settlement letters. The University of Nebraska, which I believe would be considered quite conservative, has taken the step of requesting that the RIAA compensate them for the time wasted on dealing with the issue.And I say, if the RIAA spent the money they've spent on legal fees coming up with something that works as well as Apple's FairPlay, and was able to show universities and colleges why using it would be important, aid legal compliance, and create a good example that would become a social standard, we wouldn't be having this discussion you can't believe you're having.
"the University of Nebraska has told the RIAA that it can't help them identify many of the students accused of file trading. The school's system changes a computer's IP address each time its turned on, and it only keeps this information for month. After that month, the school has no way of associating an IP address with a computer or its user. The RIAA is angry about this, and a spokesman for the group criticized the university for not understanding "the need to retain these records". This is a ridiculous complaint. The university doesn't have a need to retain these records, and there's no reason it should do so out of some obligation to the RIAA. If there were any doubt that the university is really irritated by the RIAA's requests, it has requested that the RIAA pay the university to reimburse its expenses from dealing with this (good luck with that)."
Believe it.From today's Wall Street Journal:
"I believe that intellectual property is real and that some form of copyright is appropriate to protect it. I am against the unlicensed copying of DVDs for sale on street corners, or the mass uploading of songs to so-called sharing sites."
***
"In fact, the DMCA, and other recent laws and regulations passed under pressure from media companies, are pretty hostile when it comes to consumers. They turn essentially innocent actions into unlawful behavior, because they define copyright infringement too broadly. They have given rise to a technology called Digital Rights Management that causes too many hassles for honest people and discriminates against the new digital forms of distribution."
(See my link from the Consumerist)
***
"What consumers need is real clarity on the whole issue of what is or isn't permissible use of the digital content they have legally obtained. And that can come only from Congress. Congress is the real villain here, for having failed to pass a modern copyright law that protects average consumers, not just big content companies.
"We need a new digital copyright law that would draw a line between modest sharing of a few songs or video clips and the real piracy of mass distribution. We need a new law that would define fair use for the digital era and lay out clearly the rights of consumers who pay for digital content, as well as the rights and responsibilities of Internet companies.
"If you don't like all of the restrictions on the use of digital content, the solution isn't to steal the stuff. A better course is to pressure Congress to pass a new copyright law, one that protects the little guy and the Internet itself."
And I attempt to polish no turd. We're still talking about something that's a civil offense, not a criminal one. Not piracy, not theft. If this were not the case, then one could be arrested for possessing illegally obtained files on their computers. As that is not the case, I do not see how you could possibly try to tell me that there is no difference in the distinction.Three years ago, I put a CD with MediaMax in my computer, and it installed a player WITHOUT my permission. It didn't even ASK. It started playing even though I didn't prompt it to. Woke my wife up, though she wouldn't have been if the software I didn't consent to the install of hadn't prevented me from using Dell's MusicMatch, on which I had a lower volume set, to play the files.
I still have plenty of MediaMax & XCP CDs around here. You want a rootkit on your computer?
What turd exactly? The one the Bay City Rollers are now trying to extract from Arista in the form of unpaid royalties?
I do not think it's too unreasonable to suggest that the money the labels have thrown at DRM could've been better spent on a way to more properly identify downloaders so that these bullsh*t harassment lawsuits wouldn't be disrupting the lives of innocent people, who are tarred as thieves by people who so carelessly use the term. When the facts in the Sarah Seabury Ward case became known, there was an RIAA apologist who nevertheless chose to dismiss her claims of innocence on the basis that she was a 'lying old bag lady.'
By pointing this out makes me one sympathizing with thieves? How's that? I've never had file-sharing software on my computer. Yet by pointing out the problems inherent in the RIAA's strategy, and referencing articles that took issue with the numbers presented relative to their claims as to how 'piracy' was hurting their bottom line, I was taken to task on this site.
By a certain C.J., who snidely offered his opinion that I'd just go on ripping. I'd never ripped a CD in my life. I do not like or appreciate being cast as either a thief (not that ripping a CD is or ever was illegal), or one that sympathizes with them. I've told everyone I know who participates in illegal file-sharing that I recommend they dump that software immediately & stop doing that (never mind that most are musicians), and at that time I responded to the famous C.J. by pointing out that he was the guy who was copying & pasting copyrighted newspaper articles on this site without permission. Who was engaging in theft exactly? (My post remains on Whiner's Woad)
So I have to reject where you're coming from, anecdotal evidence (yours AND mine) notwithstanding. I would re-state: one is either willing to engage in copyright infringement, or they are not. I suspect that most who are, would NOT be willing to engage in ACTUAL theft, which is a CRIMINAL act and presents harsher consequences. How could you say the law has no bearing on this?
If the law is changed to permit criminal charges to be filed for illegal file-sharing, then so be it. That's not the case. But I was also interested in what you thought of the linked article where the CUSTOMER paid money for a product they couldn't use.
I said I'd leave you alone, but I just had to say something.....The problem is when someone has a xenophobic attitude toward alternative music, any notion of impropriety amongst his preferred artists borders on intolerable.
.
Anybody who has been conditioned to accept a narrow range of music, where the inevitable questioning the artistic merit of that narrow range of music, or possible improprieties amongst the artists, makes them extremely uncomfortable. Especially when alternative music to them is unacceptable. And not an option.Most people are afraid to push their hot buttons. I'm not one of them. Because IMO, I think such people need to learn to appreciate alternative music. Otherwise they'll spend their entire time being bullies in musical discussion, mainly because it mostly covers the alternatives that they've been conditioned to despise.
For as long as I've been into music (45+ years) and for as long as I have been a professional musician (35+ years) I have found my tastes expanding. I was much more parochial when I was young and stupid.But I have to say I haven't seen anyone "conditioned" in the manner you state. I've only seen folks develop preferences and then go that one step too far by denigrating music they don't happen to like. (Me, young and stupid again.)
And I don't think anyone "needs" to learn to appreciate alternative music. They will or they won't, and who cares if they do? The music police? ;-)
"And I don't think anyone "needs" to learn to appreciate alternative music. They will or they won't, and who cares if they do? The music police? ;-) "In most part I agree with you.... The people I've cited to me hardly appreciate anything. And what they promote or denigrate isn't really due to discernment of art, but a need to elevate self-esteem.
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